I'm looking for a device which would allow all of my wired network devices to access the Internet via a single wireless hotspot, presumably by plugging into a port on a network switch.
I see devices which are advertised to allow a single wired device, like a Blu-ray player or game console, to access a WiFi access point, but haven't found anything that says it explicitly supports multiple devices.
Any pointers?
I've been searching for a "WiFi bridge." Am I using the wrong terminology?
Presumably, it's *YOUR* wireless hotspot, not the coffee shop or McDonald's down the street. Overloading a free wireless hot spot is not being very nice. I would want some assurances that this is NOT what you're doing before attempted to answer your question.
Several years ago I had this problem and solved it with a bridge connected to a switch. The bridge was the wifi source for everything connected to the switch. It worked, but had issues.
The wifi bridges available (at least then) were not so hot. I'd regularly see the bridge lose connection any time the traffic got heavy. Power cycling it usually fixed the problem, but it would be 30s minimum to get back connected.
Also there were now two outlets in use, and more little boxes to mount to the wall and another ethernet cable to make.
On the plus side, I could buy a single high-gain antenna to put on the bridge and all of the devices benefited from the improved signal.
Elijah
------ spent as much on the antenna as on the bridge
On Sat, 29 Jun 2013 18:37:49 +0000 (UTC), Bert wrote:
Thank you for at least telling the truth.
A few years ago, I worked out a scheme were I could measure the distance between a connecting wireless device and the hotspot wireless router. Too far away, and you get dropped. It works, but is somewhat expensive, making my efforts to sell or license the technology somewhat awkward. If deployed, a hotspot owner would not need to turn down the wireless transmit power to a bare minimum to keep abusers and leeches like yourself out of their system. Postings like this are great sales material for the technology. Thanks.
Another scheme to keep you out is to issue one time passwords at the cash register. This is quite popular at coffee shops. Login with the magic number on the cash register receipt, and you're good for about an hour. Don't have a magic number? Too bad.
Incidentally, I had an awful dinner at Burger King a few weeks ago. While adding another layer of grease to my arteries, I noticed that they have unencrypted, zero security, no login, no splash page, totally free Wi-Fi. Cool. Just one problem... it was dog slow. 10 Kbits/sec at best. Maybe I can help. So, I fired up this weeks favorite network scanner: and found that there were roughly 10 active wireless connections. Time to bring in the laptop. A little digging through the MAC addresses showed that at least 3 devices were routers, which probably had more than one computer hidden behind them. Looking through the parking lot, I could see the telltale glow of the LCD backlighting in several vehicles. The rest were probably in nearby offices or apartments. I ran a few "well known port" scans with Nmap, and found that there were at least 2 servers running which looked like http/ftp/video/WMP/etc servers. Sniffing the traffic from one such connection showed that it was running a Plex Media Server on port 32400. One connection was streaming video to some device on the internet. With all the other traffic, I'm surprised that it was working. I spoke very briefly with the clueless manager about the situation. My interpretation of his answer was something like "Customers want wi-fi, so we give them wi-fi. If it doesn't work or is overloaded, that's not our problem". Oh well.
Thanks and may you find the mythical free lunch that you seek.
really - well then, just answer the question and lay out the situation, the logistics, and then you may actually have an actual technical dialog - vs cat and mouse BS -
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